A Great Deliverance Read online

  “Schoolteacher,” Havers responded. “She lives on St. Chad’s Lane. Next door to the Gibsons.”

  “Thank you,” Lynley murmured, inspecting the shelves. He put on his spectacles. “Hmm. A bit of everything. But heavily into the Brontës, weren’t they?”

  Havers joined him. “Austen,” she read, “Dickens, bit of Lawrence. They went in for the classics.” She pulled down Pride and Prejudice and opened it. Tessa’s! was scrawled childishly across the flyleaf. This same declaration was in Dickens and Shakespeare, two Norton anthologies, and all the Brontës.

  Lynley moved to a book stand that was fixed underneath the room’s only window. It was the kind used for large dictionaries, but on its top rested an immense, illuminated Bible. He ran his fingers down the page to which the book was open. “‘I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt,’” he read. “‘Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither. For God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’” He looked up at Havers.

  “I’ll never understand why he forgave his brothers,” she said. “After what they’d done to him, they deserved to die.”

  The bitterness behind her words burned. He closed the book slowly, marking the place with a scrap of paper from the desk. “But he had something they needed.”

  “Food,” she scoffed.

  He removed his spectacles. “I don’t think it had anything at all to do with food. Not really,” he noted. “What’s above stairs?”

  The second floor of the house was simple: four bedrooms, lavatory, bathroom, all opening off a central, square landing illuminated by a skylight of opaque glass. An obvious modernisation to the house, this last architectural feature gave the effect of being in a greenhouse. Not altogether unpleasant, but unusual on a farm.

  The room on their right appeared to be a guest room. A neatly made, pink-counterpaned bed, a rather smallish affair considering the size of the house’s occupants, stood against one wall on a rug printed with a design of roses and ferns. It was obviously quite old, and the once brilliant reds and greens were muted now, bleeding one into the other in a soothing rust. The walls were hung with paper on which tiny flowers—dairies and marigolds—sprinkled down. On the bedside table a small lamp stood upon a circle of lace. The chest of drawers held nothing, as did the wardrobe.

  “Reminds me of a room in an inn,” Lynley remarked.

  Barbara noted the view from the window: an uninteresting panorama of the barn and the yard. “Looks as if no one’s ever used it.”

  Lynley was examining the counterpane across the bed. He pulled it back to reveal a badly stained mattress and a yellowing pillow. “No guests expected here. Odd to leave a bed unmade, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not at all. Why put sheets on it if it’s never going to be used?”

  “Except that—”

  “Look, shall I go on to the next room, Inspector?” Barbara asked impatiently. The house was oppressing her.

  Lynley glanced up at the tone of her voice. He drew the counterpane back over the bed exactly as it had been placed before and sat on the edge. “What is it, Barbara?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied, but she heard the edge of panic in her voice. “I’d just like to get on with it. This room obviously hasn’t been used in years. Why examine every inch of it like Sherlock Holmes, as if the murderer were going to pop out of the floorboards?”

  He didn’t reply at once, so the shrillness of her voice seemed to linger in the room long after she had spoken. “What’s wrong?” he repeated. “May I help?” His eyes were on her, dark with their concern, so infinitely kind. It would indeed be easy—

  “There’s nothing wrong!” she exploded. “I just don’t want to have to follow you around like a spaniel dog. I don’t know what you expect of me. I feel like an idiot. I’ve a brain, goddammit! Give me something to do!”

  He got to his feet, his eyes still on her. “Why don’t you go across the landing and deal with the next room,” he suggested.

  She opened her mouth to say more, decided against it, and left him, pausing for a moment in the greenish light of the landing. She could hear her own breathing, harsh and loud, and knew he must be able to hear it as well.

  That damnable shrine! The farm itself was bad enough with its ghastly lifelessness, but the shrine had completely unnerved her. It had been set up in the very finest corner of the room. With a view of the garden, Barbara thought weakly. Tony has the telly and she has the damn garden!

  What had Lynley called it? A religion. Yes, sweet Jesus! A temple to Tony! She compelled her breathing to return to normal, crossed the landing, and went into the next room.

  That’s torn it, Barb, she told herself. What happened to agreement, to obedience, to cooperation? How will you feel back in uniform next week?

  She looked about furiously, her lips quivering in disgust. Well, who bloody well cared? After all, it was a preordained failure. Had she really expected this to be a success?

  She crossed the room to the window and fumbled with the latch. What had he said? What is it? May I help? The insanity was that for just a moment, she had actually thought about talking to him, about telling him everything there was to tell. But, of course, it was unthinkable. No one could help, least of all Lynley.

  She unlocked the window, threw it open to feel the fresh air on her burning cheeks, then turned back, determined to do her job.

  This was Roberta’s room, neat like the other, but with a lived-in air about it. A largae four-poster was covered by a quilt, a patchwork affair with a bright, cheerfu design of sun, clouds, and rainbow on a sapphire background sky. Clothes hung in the wardrobe. Sturdy shoes—work shoes, walking shoes, slippers—stood lined beneath them. There were a dressing table with a wavy cheval glass, and a chest of drawers on which a framed photograph lay, face down, as if it had toppled over. Barbara glanced at it curiously. Mother, father, and a newborn Roberta in the father’s arms. But the picture itself, slightly distended, was crowded into its frame as if it didn’t quite fit. She turned the frame in her hands and prised off the backing.

  She was correct in her guess. The photograph had been too large for the purchased frame, so it had been folded back. Unfolded, the picture was very much different, for to the left of the father, hands clasped behind her, stood the mirror image of the baby’s mother, a smaller version, certainly, but undoubtedly the offspring of Tessa Teys.

  Barbara was about to call out to Lynley when he came to the door, a photograph album in his hands. He paused as if trying to decide how to get their relationship back in order.

  “I’ve found the strangest thing, Sergeant,” he said.

  “As have I,” she replied, as determined as he to forget her outburst. They exchanged their items.

  “Yours explains mine, I dare say,” Lynley remarked.

  She gave curious attention to the open pages of the album. It was a pictorial family record, the kind that documents weddings and births, Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. But every picture that had more than one child in it had been cut up in some way, oddly defaced, so that pictures had central slices missing or wedges cut into them, and the size of the family was systematically reduced in every one. The effect was chilling.

  “A sister of Tessa’s, I’d say,” Lynley observed.

  “Perhaps her first child,” Barbara offered.

  “Surely she’s too old to be a first child unless Tessa produced her when she was a child herself.” He set the frame down, slipped the photograph into his pocket, and turned his attention to the drawers. “Ah,” he said, “at least we know why Roberta was so anxious for the Guardian. She’s lined her drawers with it. And…Havers, look at this.” From the bottom drawer, beneath a pile of worn jerseys, he pulled something which had be
en placed face down, hidden. “The mystery girl once again.”

  Barbara looked at the photograph he handed to her. It was the same girl, but older this time, a teenager. She and Roberta were standing in the snow in St. Catherine’s churchyard, both grinning at the camera. The older girl had her hands on Roberta’s shoulders, pulling her back against her. She had bent over—although certainly not far, for Roberta was nearly as tall as she—and had pressed her cheek to the other girl’s. Her dark gold hair touched Roberta’s brown curls. In front of them, with Roberta’s hand clutched into his fur, was a border collie who looked very much as if he were grinning as well. Whiskers.

  “Roberta doesn’t look half bad there,” Barbara said, handing the picture to Lynley. “Big, but not fat.”

  “Then this must have been taken sometime before Gibson left. Remember what Stepha said? She’d not been fat then, not until Richard was gone.” He pocketed the additional photograph and looked round the room. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing much of interest.” As he had done in the other room, she drew back the quilt from the bed. Unlike the other, however, this bed was made, and its fresh, laundered linen gave off the scent of jasmine. But underneath it, as if the jasmine were incense subtly burning to hide the odour of cannabis, was the cloying smell of something more. Barbara looked at Lynley. “Do you—”

  “Absolutely,” he replied. “Help me pull off the mattress.”

  She did so, covering her mouth and nose when the stench filled the room and they saw what lay beneath the old mattress. The boxspring covering had been cut away in the far corner of the bed, and resting within was a storehouse of food. Rotting fruit, bread grey with mould, biscuits and candy, pastries half-eaten, bags of crisps.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Barbara murmured. It was more prayer than exclamation and, in spite of the catalogue of gruesome sights she had seen as a member of the force, her stomach heaved uneasily and she backed away. “Sorry,” she gasped with a shaky laugh. “Bit of a surprise.”

  Lynley dropped the mattress back into place. His face was expressionless. “It’s sabotage,” he said to himself.

  “Sir?”

  “Stepha said something about a diet.”

  As Barbara had done before, Lynley walked to the window. Evening was drawing on, and in a fading patch of the dying light he withdrew the photographs from his coat pocket and examined them. He stood motionless, perhaps in the hope that an uninterrupted, undisturbed study of the two girls would tell him who killed William Teys and why, and what a storehouse of rotting food had to do with anything. Watching him, Barbara was struck by how a trick of light falling across hair, cheek, and brow made him look vastly younger than his thirty-two years. And yet nothing altered or obscured the man’s intelligence or the wit behind his eyes, not even the shadows. The only noise in the room was his breathing, steady and calm, very sure. He turned, found her watching him, and began to speak.

  She stopped him. “Well,” she said forcefully, pushing her hair behind her ears in a pugnacious gesture, “see anything else in the other rooms?”

  “Just a box of old keys in the wardrobe and a veritable museum of Tessa,” he replied. “Clothing, photographs, locks of hair. Among Teys’s own things, of course.” He replaced the photographs in his pocket. “I wonder if Olivia Odell knew what she was in for.”

  They had walked the three-quarters of a mile from the village down Gembler Road to the Teys’s farm. As they returned, Lynley began to wish that he had driven his car. It was not so much concern that darkness had fallen but a longing for music to distract him. Without it, he found himself glancing at the woman walking wordlessly at his side, and he reluctantly considered what he had heard about her.

  “One angry vairgin,” MacPherson had said. “What she needs is a faer toss i’ the hay.” Then he roared with laughter and lifted his pint in his big, bear’s grasp. “But no’ me, laddies. I’ll not test those waters. I leave tha’ plaisure to a young’r man!”

  But MacPherson was wrong, Lynley thought. There was no question of angry virginity here. It was something else.

  This wasn’t Havers’s first murder investigation, so he could not understand her reaction to the farm: her initial reluctance to enter the barn, her strange behaviour in the sitting room, her inexplicable outburst upstairs.

  For the second time he wondered what on earth Webberly had in mind in creating their partnership, but he found he was too weary to attempt an explanation.

  The lights of the Dove and Whistle came in sight upon the final curve of the road. “Lets get something to eat,” he said.

  “Roast chicken,” the proprietor announced. “It’s our Sunday night dinner. Get you some up quick if you have a seat in the lounge.”

  The Dove and Whistle was doing a brisk evening’s business. In the public bar, which had fallen into stillness upon their entrance, a pall of cigarette smoke hung like a heavy rain cloud over the room. Farmers gathered in conversation in a corner, their mud-encrusted boots placed on rungs of ladder-backed chairs, two younger men played a boisterous game of darts near a door marked TOILETS, while a group of middle-aged women compared the Sunday evening remnants of Saturday’s crimps and curls, courtesy of Sinji’s Beauty Shoppe. The bar itself was surrounded by patrons, most of whom were joking with the girl who worked the taps behind it.

  She was clearly the village anomaly. Jet black hair rose out of her scalp in spikes, her eyes were heavily outlined in purple, and her clothes were nighttime-in-Soho explicit: short black leather skirt, white plunging blouse, black lace stockings with holes held together by safety pins, black laced shoes of the sort that grandmothers wear. Each of her ears—pierced four times—wore the dubious decoration of a line of stud earrings, except for the bottom right hole, which sported a feather dangling to her shoulder.

  “Fancies herself a rock singer,” the publican said, following their glance. “She’s m’ daughter, but I try not to let the word out often.” He thumped a pint of ale on the wobbly table in front of Lynley, gave a tonic water to Barbara, and grinned. “Hannah!” he shouted back into the public bar. “Stop making a spectacle of yourself, girl! Y’re driving every man present insane with lust!” He winked at them wickedly.

  “Oh Dad!” she laughed. The others did as well.

  “Tell him off, Hannah!” somebody called. And another, “What’s the poor bloke ever known about style?”

  “Style, is it?” the publican called back cheerfully. “She’s a cheap one to dress, all right. But she’s running through my fortune buying gunk for her hair.”

  “How d’you keep them spikes up, Han?”

  “Got scared in the abbey, I’d say.”

  “Heard the baby howl, did you, Han?”

  Laughter. A playful swing at the speaker. The statement made: See, we’re all friends here. Barbara wondered if they’d rehearsed the whole thing.

  She and Lynley were the only occupants of the lounge, and once the door closed behind the publican, she longed for the noise of the public bar again, but Lynley was speaking.

  “She must have been a compulsive eater.”

  “Who murdered her father because he put her on a diet?” It slipped out before Barbara could stop herself. Sarcasm was rich in her voice.

  “Who obviously did a lot of eating in secret,” Lynley went on. His own voice was unperturbed.

  “Well, it doesn’t look that way to me,” she argued. She was pushing him, and she knew it. It was defensive and stupid. But she couldn’t help it.

  “What does it look like to you?”

  “That food’s been forgotten. Who knows how long it’s been there?”

  “I think we can agree that it’s been there three weeks and that any food that’s left out for three weeks is likely to spoil.”

  “All right, I’ll accept that,” Barbara said. “But not the compulsive eating.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t prove it, dammit!”

  He ticked off
items on his fingers. “We have two rotting apples, three black bananas, something that at one time might have been a ripe pear, a loaf of bread, sixteen biscuits, three half-eaten pastries, and three bags of crisps. Now you tell me what we have here, Sergeant.”

  “I’ve no idea,” she replied.

  “Then if you’ve no idea, perhaps you’ll consider mine.” He paused. “Barbara—”

  She knew at once from his tone that she had to stop him. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” she said swiftly. “I got spooked at the farm and I…I’ve jumped all over you for it ever since. I…I’m sorry.”

  He appeared to be taken aback. “All right. Let’s start again, shall we?”

  The publican approached and plopped two plates down onto the table. “Chicken and peas,” he announced proudly.

  Barbara got up and stumbled from the room.

  7

  “No! Ezra, stop! I can’t!”

  With a deliberately unstifled curse, Ezra Farmington lifted himself off the struggling girl beneath him, swung to the edge of the bed, and sat there, fighting for breath and composure, his entire body—but most particularly, he noticed sardonically, his head—throbbing. He lowered this to his hands, burying his fingers in honey-coloured hair. Now she would cry, he thought. “All right, all right!” he said and added savagely, “I’m not a rapist, for God’s sake!”

  She did begin to cry at that, a fist at her mouth, dry hot sobs erupting from deep within her. He reached for the lamp. “No!” Her voice stopped him.

  “Danny,” he said, trying to speak calmly but aware that he was forcing words out between clenched teeth. He couldn’t look at her.

  “I’m sorry!” she wept.

  It was all too familiar. It couldn’t go on. “This is ridiculous, you know.” He reached for his watch, saw from the luminous dial that it was nearly eight, and put it on. He began to dress.

  At that, the crying increased. A hand reached for him, touched his naked back. He flinched. The sobbing continued. He picked up the rest of his clothes, left the room, went into the lavatory, and, after dressing, stared morosely at his reflection in the dusky mirror while his watch ticked away five minutes.